BORROWINGS; Really Like That Painting? Why Not Take It Home!

By LAURA RANDALL

Published: March 30, 2005

WHEN Kisu Shin walked into the art rental and sales gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the first time, she was just out of law school and money was tight. She wanted to cover her new home's bare walls with original paintings, but knew little about art and her own tastes in d?r. Despite these obstacles, Ms. Shin left the gallery with a 20-by-30-inch abstract painting by a Southern California artist valued at more than 10 times the amount she was charged on her credit card. The catch: she had to return it in two months.

Ms. Shin, now a real estate litigation lawyer, estimates she has rented nearly 20 paintings from the museum after a friend told her about its rental program a decade ago. Both her income and confidence in her own artistic preferences have grown since then, but she still rents pieces before committing to buy them.

''I like nice art, but I'm not ready to plop down $5,000 if I don't really know I'll like something,'' she said. ''You see a painting somewhere, and it looks great on a blank wall, but when you get it home with your stuff it looks bizarre.''

Call it the art museum's version of a test-drive. For years, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and similar institutions have been quietly renting artworks from outside their collections to individuals and corporations for years. The cost of a painting ranges from $250 to $30,000, with the rental fee typically set at 10 percent of its value. If a person decides to buy the painting at the end of the rental period, a portion of the fee may be applied toward the sales price. The artist gets 50 to 75 percent of each rental or purchase, while the museum pockets the rest.

Other museums with rental programs include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Seattle Art Museum and the Racine Art Museum in Racine, Wis. ''Under the auspices of the museum, it has a nice little touch of approval to it,'' says Alice Hupfel, who recently retired as manager of the Delaware Art Museum's art sales and rental gallery. ''For the individual, it gives them a chance to live with a work of art and find out if they truly do love it as much as they thought they did upon their first look.''

The idea of rental galleries took hold in the 1970s, often led by volunteer groups, as a way of raising money and boosting public awareness of local artists. ''Lots of people come in because they have a new house and have lots of walls to fill. We get that all the time,'' said Patricia Howard, the program manager at the Los Angeles museum. She estimates that between a third and one-half of residential clients end up buying the paintings they rented.

Some customers show up at rental galleries with specific needs. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for instance, has rented paintings to the set designer for the Bay Area-based television show ''Nash Bridges,'' as well as to the parents of a bride who wanted to enhance the sterile walls of a rented reception hall. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a man who was holding a party whose guests included former president Bill Clinton rented several paintings to display in his home for the event, then brought them back the next day even though he had paid a full two-month cycle, Ms. Howard said. Other galleries have experienced a recent spike in business from people who are hired to spruce up empty homes going on the market.

At the same time, not all museums welcome the concept of renting art to the public. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has never offered such a program, and several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, discontinued their longtime programs in recent years, citing their administrative costs.

''We lost a lot of money trying to chase down pieces,'' said Sande Maslow, director of art sales at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ''You'd have pieces that are worth $300, so you'd rent it out for $30 and the administrative work and handling for that one piece would cost over $100. You were just losing money left and right.''

Now, he said, the museum rents only to corporate clients, who are more likely to rent dozens of paintings at once and are easier to track down if they are delinquent in returning them.

And though museums are most reluctant to rent from their permanent collections, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College has been renting its Renoirs and other notable pieces from a designated 400-piece collection to its students since 1940.

The program was started by an Oberlin art professor who wanted her students to experience art outside a museum. The rental rate is $5 per semester, with a limit of two per student. Students have been known to camp out in the courtyard and miss classes in order to be first in line.

For other museums, the rental programs offer a steady, if not blockbuster, revenue stream. ''It's absolutely lucrative for us,'' said Jennifer Zika, the director of the Portland Museum of Art's rental gallery. ''We turn in revenue every single year.'' The gallery grosses an average of $550,000 to $600,000 a year and nets about $100,000, or 2 percent of the museum's total annual income, Ms. Zika said. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art grosses an average of $800,000 a year and nets about $200,000 from the program, Ms. Howard said.

For artists, the rental galleries can be a mixed blessing. When Robert Brokl signed on with the San Francisco museum's rental gallery while getting his master's of fine arts from the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980's, ''it was seen as a feeding school or a kind of a junior league,'' he recalled. Today, he says, more artists have accepted it as ''a dependable kind of floor'' -- or gallery space -- ''to show your work, even for those who are mid-career and established.''

Although artists are often drawn to the galleries by their connection to the museum and its brand power, the selection available at the rental galleries does not necessarily reflect the museum's permanent exhibitions.

''It's more about giving local artists support than about paralleling any of the choices the museum makes in its collection,'' says Steve Pon, exhibitions coordinator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's rental gallery.

There is also no guarantee that any artist who shows up with a portfolio will be welcomed. Most galleries return any pieces that don't rent or sell after six months or a year.

The gallery sometimes gets requests to rent pieces from the permanent collection, but they are always turned down.

''We just can't rent a Matisse to somebody,'' Mr. Pon said.

Photos: WALL TO WALL -- Kisu Shin and her husband, Nolan Lam, bought paintings by Hei Myung Hyun after renting.; CHOICES -- At top, Phyllis Coleman, right, a volunteer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, shows Louise Manfe a rental painting. The gallery's manager, Patricia Howard, helps with a delivery. (Photographs by Marissa Roth for The New York Times)